Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Best of the Roses (but not rose colored glasses),New Media Matters: an everyday art@mystrawhat.com

@NewEdayMedia(tweet tweet)

P.S. met her in person w/ her band @JulietLewis&theLicks @Mr.Small'sTheatre (across from @Lawrenceville #41st St Bridge @Millvale, Pennsylvania) and Juliet Lewis is just as dreamy in person as in this photo & upcoming @funnyordie #nextweek

Sunday, January 13, 2013

PROOF! The only absolute in this world is that most
objective scientific opinion & ruling in agreement by all religions and
scientific authorities (all in a universal agreement of say how to measure a meter)
is the absolute arrogance of the ignorance of these people who think they know
it all. .. Case in point, they can’t just celebrate that there’s proof that “life”
exists elsewhere than on our own Earth & solar system. Because since it’s
not someone from the IvoryTower of Academics (a club so elite it casts a glowering
shadow over the club Andrew Carnegie, Frick, Mellon and all those men who made
Pittsburgh / the USA one of the most industrialized wealthy spots in the entire
world, The Duquesne Club), they have to collectivity convey the “real surprise”
… that “It's remarkable to think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.” said the
University of Oxford's Chris Lintott, who helms the Zooniverse, in a statement.

a habitable zone in which conditions
are liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface and potentially supportlife,
could mean there is a "traffic jam" of worlds where life could exist,
project officials said.

"These are planet candidates that slipped
through the net, being missed by professional astronomers and rescued by
volunteers in front of their web browsers,” said the University of Oxford's
Chris Lintott, who helms the Zooniverse, in a statement. “It's remarkable to
think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.”

Amateur Astronomers Discover 42 Alien Planets

A team of amateurs has discovered evidence for 42 alien planets,
including a Jupiter-size world that could potentially be habitable, by sifting
through data from a NASA spacecraft.

Forty volunteers with the crowd-sourcing
Planet Hunters
project discovered the new planet candidates, which include 15 potentially
habitable worlds and PH2 b, a Jupiter-size planet that the team confirmed to be
in the habitable zone
of its parent star.

This is the second time Planet
Hunters project, which is overseen by Zooniverse, has confirmed a new exoplanet
discovery. What's more, several candidate planets found by the project may be
in the habitable zones of their parent stars. These candidates are awaiting confirmation by professional astronomers.

Researchers suggested this bonanza of
planets in the so-called Goldilocks zone around a star, a habitable
zone in which conditions are liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface
and potentially supportlife, could mean there is a "traffic jam" of
worlds where life could exist, project officials said.

"These are planet candidates
that slipped through the net, being missed by professional astronomers and
rescued by volunteers in front of their web browsers,” said the University of
Oxford's Chris Lintott, who helms the Zooniverse, in a statement. “It's
remarkable to think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.”

Life on an 'Avatar'-like moon

The planet PH2 b was found using data from NASA's prolific Kepler Space
Telescope and confirmed with 99.9 percent confidence by observations at the
W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Ph2 b is considered much too large to host life. However, any moons orbiting
the planet could be strong candidates, astronomers said. The atmospheric
temperature on the planet would range between 86 and minus 126 degrees
Fahrenheit (30 and minus 88 degrees Celsius) in the habitable zone.

“Any moon around this newly discovered, Jupiter-sized planet might be
habitable," stated Ji Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.
He is lead author of a paper about the discoveries, which has been submitted to
the Astrophysical Journal and is available on the pre-publishing website Arxiv.

If a theoretical moon were to host life,
it would likely have a rocky core, plus a greenhouse atmosphere of some sort
that could have liquid water on its surface, the researchers said.

"It’s very similar to what was
depicted in the movie ‘Avatar’ – the habitable
moon Pandora around a giant
planet, Polyphemus," Wang added.

A telltale dim

Volunteers spotted PH2 b by watching its
parent star.
As the planet passed in front of the star, the apparent brightness from Earth
dimmed.

This is one of two commonly used techniques for finding exoplanets; the other is
looking for wobbles in a star's gravityas a planet speeds around it.

Planet Hunters includes participation
from Oxford, Yale and several other institutions. Volunteers pour over data
from Kepler. Once the strongest candidates are identified, professional
astronomers take a look at them.

Planet Hunters has found 48 candidate
planets so far. The first confirmed planet, PH1, was revealed in October 2011.